Git Graph Next

A fast, interactive Git graph for VS Code: browse your repository's history, see what every commit changed, and branch, merge, rebase and more — right from the graph.

Getting started

Open the graph from the Git Graph Next icon in the Activity Bar, the Git Graph item in the status bar, the Source Control title bar, or the command Git Graph Next: View Git Graph.

• Click a commit to see its details and changed files; click a file for its diff.
• Right-click a commit, a branch, a tag or a stash for everything you can do with it.
• Ctrl/Cmd+click or Shift+click to select several commits — two selected commits are compared.
• Double-click a branch label to check it out.
• Ctrl/Cmd+F to search.
• Keyboard: the arrow keys, Page Up/Down, Home and End move through the history, Shift extends the selection, and the menu key or Shift+F10 opens the actions of the selected commit — and of its branches and tags.

Features

A graph that stays readable

• Branch, remote-branch and tag labels. A local branch and its remote copy at the same commit share one label.
• The Uncommitted Changes row and your stashes appear in the graph.
• Pin long-lived branches like main or develop to a column of their own, drawn as a straight line.
• Give branches fixed colours, and optionally show each commit's branch colour on its row.
• Compact mode folds long stretches of linear history into single rows, so the branching structure fits on one screen.
• Issue references such as #123 become links — automatically for GitHub and GitLab, and through your own rules for Jira or anything else.
• Git notes are marked on commits and shown in their details.
• Hover a commit to bring out the line of the branch it is on; a detached HEAD is shown where it is.
• Staged and working tree changes can be shown as two separate rows.
• Open a second graph tab to compare two repositories, or two places in one history, side by side.

Search and filter

• Search with operators: author:alice, message:"null check", tag:v1, after:2024-01-01, date:>=2024-03-15, and more. Press the ? in the search bar for the full list.
• A match further back than what is loaded? Search older commits finds it and loads the graph up to it.
• Filter the graph by branches and tags, author, file or folder, or any extra git log arguments (--no-merges, --since=…).
• Hide branches and tags by pattern (dependabot/*, nightly-*).
• View File History from the Explorer or the editor: the graph filtered to one file, followed across renames.

Review and compare

• Code review: start one on a commit, on two selected commits, or on a branch against the current one (everything since they forked, as a pull request shows it). Every file you open is marked reviewed; Alt+] and Alt+[ go to the next and previous file not yet reviewed, right from the diff editor. Reviews are kept per workspace and can be resumed after a restart.
• All Changes opens every changed file of a commit or comparison in one scrolling editor.
• Select two commits to compare them, or compare any commit with your working tree; open a file as it was at a commit, or compare it with your working copy.
• Go to Branch, Tag or Stash… jumps to anything in the graph.
• Open External Directory Diff in your graphical diff tool (diff.guitool).

Act on it

• Branches: check out, create, rename, delete (also on the remote), delete several at once, merge, rebase, pull and push. A force-push goes with a lease that also refuses to overwrite commits that only a background fetch has brought in — work you have never seen stays on the remote.
• Commits: cherry-pick, revert, reset, create a branch or tag, check out.
• Several commits: cherry-pick, revert, squash or drop them together.
• Interactive rebase in a normal VS Code editor: reorder the list, change pick to reword, squash, fixup, edit or drop, then Start Rebase.
• Fixup commits and autosquash, straight from the commit you want to fix.
• Stashes: apply, pop, drop, or turn into a branch.
• Patches: create them from commits or uncommitted changes, and apply them to the working tree or as commits.
• Archives: save the files of any commit as .zip or .tar.gz.
• Repository settings: add, change and remove remotes; set the user name and e-mail for one repository.
• Copy a commit's link, or open it on GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
• When a merge, rebase, cherry-pick or revert stops at a conflict, a banner offers Continue and Abort.

Every action shows exactly what it will do before it runs, and destructive ones are marked as such. When git or ssh needs a password or a key passphrase, it is asked for in VS Code. Show Git Output (in More) lists every git command the actions ran.

Keyboard and screen readers

• Everything a right-click offers is reachable without a mouse: select a commit with the arrow keys, then press the menu key or Shift+F10. The commit's branches and tags are listed first, each opening its own actions.
• Screen readers read each commit as one sentence — its message, branches and tags, author, date and hash — and follow the selection as it moves. Changed files are read the same way, and Enter opens a file's diff.
• Menus follow the arrow keys, Home and End; Escape closes them and puts focus back where it was.

Settings

All settings are under Git Graph Next in the Settings editor. The ones most worth knowing:

Performance

Only the rows on screen are drawn, whatever the length of the history. Laying out 100,000 commits takes around a fifth of a second the first time and a few tens of milliseconds after that, and the time does not grow with the number of branches open side by side — measured with 2 and with 20,000, and kept that way by a test. Most of the time goes into git log itself, which is much faster when the repository has a commit-graph file. Recent versions of git write one during git gc; you can also write it yourself:

git commit-graph write --reachable

Requirements

• Git 2.17 or later on your PATH, or set in git-graph-next.git.path (or VS Code's git.path). Guarding a force-push against a background fetch needs git 2.30; older versions use a plain lease.
• VS Code 1.85 or later. Only public VS Code APIs are used, so VSCodium and remote windows (SSH, containers, WSL) are supported too.
• Works in SHA-1 and SHA-256 repositories (git init --object-format=sha256), and in linked worktrees and submodules — a commit made in a terminal there shows up in the graph as well.
• Git Graph Next runs git in your workspace, so it is disabled in untrusted workspaces.

Privacy

Git Graph Next collects no data. It talks to the network only when you fetch, pull or push, through your own git — and, if you turn on git-graph-next.fetchAvatars, to fetch avatars: for each author shown, the MD5 hash of their e-mail address is sent to Gravatar (or their user name to GitHub, for GitHub no-reply addresses). Avatars are off by default; when on, they are cached on disk in the extension's own storage, and Git Graph Next: Clear Avatar Cache removes them.

Feedback and bug reports

This is the first release, published as a preview. Bugs, feature requests, questions and anything else are welcome.

• Issues: https://github.com/vesangelov/Git-graph-next/issues — the best place for anything that others may hit too.
• E-mail: vesangelovdev@gmail.com — for anything you would rather not file in public.

A bug report goes a long way with your VS Code version, your git --version, and what Show Git Output (in More) printed for the command that went wrong.

Patches are welcome too — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how the code is arranged and how to build it. For security issues, see SECURITY.md.

About

Git Graph Next is an independent, clean-room project under the MIT licence. It is not a fork of, and not affiliated with, the Git Graph extension by mhutchie; no code from that project was used. See NOTICE.md.